#.Professor Jellyfish speaks

[the-jellydex]

NATIONAL JELLYFISH DAY

HAPPY NATIONAL JELLYFISH DAY ALL!!

I nearly forgot about it, but today's a day to celebrate all jellies of the world <3

Now, how can one possibly celebrate national jellyfish day when it is almost over?... Uh, to be honest I don't really know, but boy do I have a jellyfish for you guys to feast your eyes on ^-^!

Don't let her appearance fool you- she's not a jelly of the Netrostoma or Cephea genus- she's on a bonne-fide genus of her own, the Margavia stellata (named for the star-like patterns on its bell)!

It lacks the raised bump(s) that the other jellyfish in its family (Cephidae) have, but other than that resemble the basic Cephidae body shape. It's also probably one of the cutest jellyfish out there, in my opinion

[sirenjose]

Predictions for The Voyage of Oceanus

(I made guesses last year for the Zinaida event and managed to correctly guess Andrew was the culprit/killer before it was revealed, so I wanted to try to do that again this year before we got too much info or any answers)

Main Predictions

Frederick is the antagonist (as in he will be the cause of the events that occur during this event or at least a contributor to some degree)

The jellyfish toxins will be the cause of everyone going crazy/behaving abnormally and whatever hallucinations they see (ex: my guess is it is the reason behind Alice's behavior and what she said she saw to Inference)

Charles will be involved in whatever incident Inference has to solve but won't be the actual true culprit (this is a guess based on Charles' backstory, as his actions indirectly lead to the (accidental) death of his friend. As it was indirect, that's why I guess in this event Charles will either be falsely suspected to be the culprit or may play a minor role in what happens but he won't do anything super bad, at least on purpose)

Violeta may seem dead but may not actually be truly dead (based on how she likely survives in canon after Joker leaves her to die in the snow, and how I wonder if she'll be involved in the "guest performance" referenced in Mike's 3rd letter)

Side Notes/Predictions

That agreement Branley had many of the personnel aboard the ship on his voyage sign is suspicious, the same one that Mr. Worthington didn't have to sign as he wasn't part of the "core personnel". Secretive agreements usually imply something up. "Trying to hide their research discoveries" feels like whatever they found out could be important, and the crew 25 years later will likely discover whatever it was considering Inference makes a comment about doing so during the event. Not sure yet about this, just wanted to call out it's suspicious and stood out to me.

Speaking of suspicious, there's also that letter from whoever provided Inference with his disguise. No idea who this is. I did try to think about who it could be, but many of my guesses didn't feel quite right (I wondered about Wu Chang, but we know nothing about him or why he'd help. There's Paranormal Detective, but he wouldn't do something like this. There's Fiona, who does do disguises, but I'm not quite sure. There's White, but like Paranormal Detective, as Inference knows him, I doubt he'd do something in this fashion. My big random guess is DM, even if just because he'd get a laugh out of making Inference dress in the type of outfit Inference detests. That and DM seems to be the reason Inference gets involved in a lot of the cases we see during these anniversary events. So yea, he's so far my first guess, but who knows.)

Frederick was the "benefactor" to spend a "huge amount of money" building this copycat ship and getting all the exact details, down to the roles people play, as similar as possible. So with how long he spent to prepare this, it contributes to the idea that Frederick could be behind whatever incident occurs during this event aboard the ship.

I don't quite know why, but for some reason Keigan mentioning the "blue jellyfish pendant" stood out a lot to me. (Honestly I at first didn't really read everything, but I paused after seeing that mentioned). Not quite sure why, but reading it made me wonder if whatever this was would be important, or if it appearing or disappearing would be important for this event. I actually reread everything after that, which was when I realized it belonged to this "Professor Schelling". It was only then that I made the connection "Hey, Frederick's S-tier has blue jellyfish themes all over his outfit". Maybe if Frederick was tied to this Schelling person, that could explain why he'd put so much effort into recreating this ship and voyage. Then from there, I noticed it mentions Schelling's "acedemic achievements" weren't "directly inherited", with his children being "too young" to learn anything of "scientific value". Not "directly inherited" makes me think of Frederick in canon who didn't inherit his family's musical talent. And I had to reread the children bit twice to realize it's not saying he didn't have children. He did, they were just too young. So his children were the ones that didn't "inherit" that stuff from the previous line. Ergo, Frederick might be the kid of this Professor Schelling. So even if he wasn't very knowledgeable about science initially, considering the science books in his room, it seems he might've tried to fix that, potentially similar to Frederick trying to be a famous musician despite not having the same musical skills as his family. If Frederick is recreating what happened 25 years ago, and his father was involved, maybe he's trying to prove he is just as good as his father? I'm also thinking of parallels to Frederick in canon and why he's going after the Blue Hope gem...

Similar to how I wonder if Orpheus drugs the participants by including it in their meals, I wonder if the jellyfish toxins will poison people by being included in people's meals. Frederick did mention it can affect people if ingested. That would potentially mean Demi might be working with Frederick, since she prepares people's foods. Considering how Demi seems to be working with the manor owner and her roles in other events, this wouldn't surprise me too much. Her name is "Siren" after all, so this sort of role, especially if she's giving people toxins that could cause hallucinations like a siren's song might, seems fitting for her codename.

The mention of electromagnetic fields reminds me of some of the research/theories I wrote regarding Jose, as I remember discussing how electromagnetic fields, like what is mentioned in Wu Chang's letters regarding events during Jose's game, can affect compasses, which can lead to people getting lost, which I remember due to my research regarding Jose's Bobolink skin (bobolinks are birds that can navigate via electromagnetic fields, and will fly in the wrong direction due to mesing with those fields). I remember the event mentioned Inference's clock being frozen at 6:30. I wonder if this'll be important somehow. (I also just find all the potential connections to stuff I did for Jose funny and had to call it out. Works out I already did all this research so I know about some of this already ^_^')

[thegeminisage]

ok we watched the tng pilot. let's get into it

data is my best friend on this show and i love him

i liked riker but jonathan frakes looks like a baby without facial hair. he's gotta grow that in. also, at one point he asked someone a question and i got really excited. he should ask more people more questions i think thats what jonathan frakes was born to do. that and sit in chairs with style

also liked geordi even though we only saw him for 3 seconds and worf even though same.

the sections with q draaaaaaagged. ik people like q and whatever he has going on with picard but i'm just not there yet. this "humans are NOT savages anymore" plotline has been played out in tos many times to better effect

actually shocked picard was such a dick. idk why i was expecting him to be more kind maybe i was projecting professor x onto him?? but he kinda sucked lol like what was EVEN going on w his little pissing contest with riker

love and light, there should not be children on a starship. space is fucking dangerous. they're literally boldly going where no one has gone before. these kids could get hurt

the ship??? splits?????????? IS THAT LEGAL????

ok, furthermore, sorry, speaking of kids, not to be a misogynist but out of the 3 ladies (troi, crusher, and yar) i dislike 2 of them. love and light to deanna troi but i really hope she gets something to do besides emote and go OH THE PAIN...her look was slay. i understand completely how she turned women gay. give her something to do. give her a chance. i know she could be good.

i didn't mind dr crusher until she let her kid on the bridge even though you're not supposed to do that and they told him to touch nothing and he proceeded to touch everything and then she got mad when picard got mad. picard spent 70% of this episode being a dick and the one time he was justified she was like :/ wow you're such a dick. lmao. girl come on he literally said don't touch anything he was already being nicer than he had to be. the child was in the wrong children shouldn't even be on this ship

also they talk about wesley like he's their affair baby. idw if its true but nobody tell me. let me believe it. wesley crusher destined to suffer through male pattern baldness

also, i can see now why you're not supposed to date your ship mates. dating them is fine but being exes with them is excruciating and we had TWO PAIRS this pilot

anyway. tasha yar was rad i DID love her.

it's weird though how many of them use first names...in tos sometimes they didn't even use last names, only titles. spock called bones "doctor" almost exclusively. so riker calling geordi geordi after like 5 minutes of knowing him was a little weird

i cried when bones showed up. sue me. his prosthetics were terrible and i already miss him so much.

SPACE JELLYFISH. that part was good

overall both the adventure and the interpersonal stuff was a little ????? which is like. you can flop on one or the other. i DO have faith it will get better but i feel kind of lukewarm on it so far

there's a lot of direct counterpoints to tos, but it's shuffled JUUUST enough so it feels like it isn't copying tos's homework word for word but rewording it to trick the teacher. for example, data is like spock in that he doesn't understand emotions or whatever, but it's actually the inverse because spock understands and pretends not to, while data truly doesn't understand but wants to. then you have deanna troi who's sort of filling in for the other thing spock used to do, which is give us general impressions about unknown alien life, but she SPECIFICALLY does it through emotions so she doesn't resemble spock too much. the captain and first officer have a lot of scenes together but they're tense so it doesn't look too tempting to the slash fans. the doctor is still a bit grumpy but she's a woman this time. they don't use tricorders but geordi's special prosthetic helps them see all that shit anyway. it's tos but shuffled. lmao that it took 2 people to replace spock <3

anyway my favorite part, aside from the part bones was in, was when riker and data talked in the holodeck. and riker was like actually yeah the fact that you're a machine DOES make me uncomfortable. and data is like well i am superior but i'd like to be human actually! and you could see the little gears in riker's head turning and later he called data friend. i liked that and i love data. i love data he's very important even though the pilot wasn't good i think i would keep watching no matter what for data. and i knew it would be like that.

[baptaincarnacles]

Octonauts- but it's just things my family has said:

-

Kwazzi, scoffing: I saw someone on the internet who didn't know if Jerma was real. They thought he was some mythical character.

Barnacles: So, did you tell them that Jerma is a real person?

Kwazzi: Well...

Kwazzi: The question they asked was, “is Jerma real?”

Kwazzi: I told them simply, “no.”

Barnacles:

Barnacles: I think that you're becoming a problem on the internet.

---

Shellington: Can you see if I left my room in the kitchen?

Dashi: What?

Shellington:

Shellington: I meant can you see if I left my notepad in my room? Jumping jellyfish.

---

Peso: *jumbles words*

Peso: Oh my- it sounded like I said various slurs.

Barnacles: I don't think you did- but it reminds me of the old Mickey Mouse clips from the 1940s. Specifically those with Goofy.

The crew:

Barnacles:

The crew:

Barnacles:

Kwazzi: Alright, this is part of my day now.

---

Dashie: *drops a phone on her face* I'm getting a little too attracted to electronics.

---

Kwazzi: *referring to another sea myth* It brings a very unbridled feeling to my soul- I don't know what unbridle means.

---

Shellington: OH MY GOD THERE’S A FLEA- I MEAN A FLY- I MEAN- WHAT ARE THEY CALLED? I HATE MYSELF-

Barnacles, distraught: A gnat?

Shellington, still screaming: YEAH-

---

Barnacles: *accidentally runs into Tracker*

Tracker: Ow- you hit me in the karate place!

---

Peso: What in the sneak snack did you say to me?

---

Peso, after hearing another horror story: Manifesting that no one is in the bathroom with me.

---

Barnacles: I'll let you take a spin if you can tell me a classical composer.

Kwazzi: William Mozart and the third one!

Barnacles:

Barnacles: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...?

---

Professor Inkling: I'm going to forbid myself from speaking.

[imp-thing]

Spoilers for The Mermaid’s Tongue

Judging the suspects on what they might be like based off their silhouettes because I feel judgmental and annoying

———

- I’m noticing the small little circle I’m guessing that’s either a monocle or glasses. Resulting in these ideas, they’re either fancy or smart/nerdy.

- I’m leaning more towards smart/nerdy, the way he’s posed is just giving that vibe, yk?

- probably a lil goofy. A lil silly.

- I feel like this person is the youngest of the characters.

- probably immature and energetic, how I like my characters tbh.

- is that little thing sticking out of its head a tongue? Does this person have a giant tongue? Is it a person??

- That small hat thing it has is making me think that he’s supposed to smart, but the size of the head compared to the body is also making me think he’s dumb as hell

- I think he’d maybe give off sorta father-like vibes if he’s the latter and just a grumpy middle aged guy if the former

- If this person is a dude (which it probably is), I’m betting he’s gonna be kind of annoying.

- I apparently keep hearing that there’s a character that is apparently a character who’s a doctor (or at least goes by Dr.) and I’m assuming it’s this dude. That hair and pipe….. you can tell man.

- Old. Not too old, but middle age old.

- Smart. Most likely. And I’m guessing he’s gonna bully Grimoire for being dumb

- He’s giving off as if he knows/is friends with Professor pointer. Or at least looks like he would. Or maybe they’d be/are the worst of enemies, who knows.

- Oh I can TELL you’re gonna be cocky as shit.

- He looks like he’d say, “won’t you shake a poor sinner’s hand?”

- I’m betting that hat looks like a jellyfish

- Grimoire is probably going to HATE him and this dude would bully him EVERY TIME HE’D GET THE CHANCE. (Toxic yaoi /j)

- He can probably beat someone up and is willing to

- I sorta think he’d be a strong and silent type but not like a Fitz 2.0, I feel like if he were to speak he’s threaten the person he’d speak to.

- before we get into this one PLEASE TELL ME IM NOT THE ONLY ONE THINKS THIS SILHOUETTE LOOKS LIKE FUKAMI FROM OKEGOM

- Probably one of if not the only girl here

- Probably willing to beat someone up

- I think she’s kinda like hawkshaw but more talkative in a way if that makes sense?

- Her and Sally are gonna get along

- If anyone is going to be the murderer, I genuinely hope it’s not her

- Ik we already know the looks of this dude, but I’ll say that he looks like a pirate fan/would act like a pirate in a way, that’s all

- I also wanna tug at his hair, I feel like it’s snap if you pulled hard enough, it looks kinda rocky and solid

———

Okay that’s it I’m gonna go get something to eat

[dadjoke-ness]

The next pokemon remake / legends game should ACTUALLY be Alola.

Now I know, Johto or Unova would be more popular of an opinion but hear me out.

First: Alola is heavily referenced throughout P:LA. The clothes you wear when you fall out of the sky, Rowlet, ride pokemon, even the guardians are similar to the totem pokemon.

Speaking of, Alola also started the large versions of pokemon. The Totems are essentially alphas / guardians / titans. And you can get Totem-sized pokemon in USUM.

Alola also feels the most like a legends game. Imagine if you could revisit Alola but they made it more like Legends, open world, facing the various Totems, meeting the four guardians. Hell, it even has the space-time rifts that you can literally travel through.

Story wise it would be very easy to connect, Arceus is sending you back and you fall through the wrong wormhole. You still have your Arc phone and we meet either Laventon's brother or the ancestor of the Oaks. Or, you sail to Alola yourself to try and travel home through a wormhole, leaving your pokemon in Laventon's care.

You travel the islands proving yourself by battling the totems. You maybe even get in touch with Laventon and he sends you letters every so often (maybe with some auto-generated "Sparkles is missing you!" with your lead pokemon in your PLA game if you have save files for both games.)

You befriend ancient Nebby, and ancient Nebby stays in your house / tent. Because befriending the legends like we did in S/M and S/V is great.

Maybe you prevent the disaster that happened long ago and split the Alola universe into the areas where we get ultra beasts like my baby angels Buzzwole and Guzzlord. We don't get banished this time but asked for help (Hey Player, Professor Laventon and Commander Komado said you saved the Hisui region, pls do for us?).

And maybe our "Pastures" to visit our pokemon is the islands where our pokemon lived before, but this time run by a kind and goofy ancestor of Lusamine who wears a big jellyfish hat and may be a witch. And we can visit them and it's wonderful.

And, for all of us....

Machamp can carry us around again.

Plus: Toucannon. Best early route bird I will not take critique.

And we could get an extinct Oricorio form with like a now extinct flower....I'm thinking green or blue flower because we don't have enough water/flying or grass/flying.../j. More seriously though, Alola popped off with birds.

[jellubilee]

Hello, my name is Jubilee and this blog is being used to submit display my work completed in one of my college classes! It’s going to be about me trying and very likely failing to get an okay-ish grasp of a whole bunch of different emerging technologies.

I’m not coming into this with a lot of prior knowledge about the internet, in a broad sense, especially being an english major who had essentially no active social media accounts.. until now! The Fun and Interesting thing about all of this is that I am expected to write these blogs to the general public, although the main person seeing them will be my professor. Hello professor.

Anyways. I think my main hope for this class I’m taking is that I quickly take to the 3d modeling unit! I have high hopes for understanding the basics of that, especially because I’ve been practicing digital art for… 3 weeks now? Only 2d, so it’ll be a new type of digital art when we reach that unit. Other interesting things about me? I’m in my second year of college, and I love jellyfish. The jellyfish as my header is a flower hat jellyfish, and the one as my profile picture is a cannonball jellyfish. Since absolutely nobody is asking, if I had to assign the professor a jellyfish, I would assign him the atolla jellyfish. It’s a very cool one I suggest you look it up. It fits your name.

Speaking of fish, here is a photo of my family’s saltwater fish tank! I am the second most qualified person to take care of it. That’s what I like to think. It’s like my dog, “or something.” In this photo is the clownfish, the yellow watchman goby, and blurred in the back is the six lined wrasse.

Just to be clear: this blog is not about the ocean or jellyfish! It is about technology! This is just my winning personality shining through.

[grigori77]

A familiar problem ...

WARNING!! Spoilers ahead ...

Sprinkle pines for the fjords

Jester really needs to learn to look after her pets

Oh, so this is basically a magical Oliver & Co.

The CLAPP. If you nasty ...

Travis' commitment to the voice

LAURA'S commitment to the voice

The fact they KEEP cracking Marisha up. She had no idea what she was unleashing upon herself, did she?

Is it just the Brooklyn accent, or is Joanne really just so done with everything?

I always love how, when he's DM, Matt's (usually) the epitome of composure (even if it is long suffering sometimes), but when he's a player he is a pure chaos gremlin

I'm just WAITING for somebody to hit the appropriate stress level

My money is on Travis

Isabella and that accent is an experience in itself

Oh man, Sprinkle is falling in love with a psycho peacock

Toby+Drudy+broken bottle=yikes

Matt: "Now I am a crab ... with a knife."

Oh boy ... the "loving touch of CLAPP" ...

When in doubt, YEET the crab

Marisha, as Sprinkle hits that blunt: "Make a fierce check, cuz that is funny."

Ah, so Heidi has elected to be the mom friend

No, no, don't go in the creepy little shack

Froga Yaga ... yeah, there's nothing suspicious about THAT

Heidi: "Animals eating animals, is that cannibalism?"

The Pervy Deer?

Yeah somebody needs to have The Talk with Nugget ...

The Rabbit and The Murder Baby

The Unlucky Fucks Card ...

Marisha: "You have ... the stench of the Harbinger -- what, rabies?"

That's a lot of AKAs

Sprinkle trips balls

Yes, I was wondering when Arty would show up

This marble game is gonna give me anxiety

Of course it's Sprinkle who screws the log ...

The doom of the three blind mice

Sprinkle loses his shit

Jellyfish. Of course there's jellyfish

Human floaters ...

CLAPP loses her shit

Joanne's atrocious performance of Aerosmith

The bucket speaks

The map! The map!

Oh yeah, I remember this bit

Marisha: "This is Archie."

Wow. A live owl in the studio has COMPLETELY derailed the whole episode because he's too adorable

Professor Thaddeus starts monologuing

Furious owl attack!

The cigar is forever lit. It's a movie. We don't know how these things work.

Isabella: "I need to Mulan this owl."

Wow. Fjord just eldritch blasted Sprinkle. Travis is being seriously meta'd by this game

Marisha's dad said beware these broken bottle rockets

Pop pop

Oh yeah. Caleb LIGHTS THE DOCK ON FIRE.

Stabby crab throws the knife. Misses entirely

Welcome to the Mistake ...

[sciencestyled]

Reality? Augmented and Virtual? Pfft, Who Needs That? Just Strap On and Yeet into the Future of Art!

Ladies and gents, dudes and dudettes, gather 'round as we dive headfirst into the glittering, neon-drenched rabbit hole of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) art. Now, I know what you're thinking: “Is this just another Professor Pop fever dream?” Well, buckle up, because we’re about to embark on a wild ride that makes Alice's Wonderland look like a Sunday stroll in the park.

First off, let's talk AR. Imagine if Snapchat filters and Instagram reels had a baby with the art world – a baby that grew up on a steady diet of electric Kool-Aid and superhero movies. AR is all about layering digital funkiness over our humdrum reality. Like, why settle for boring old real-world sculptures when you can whip out your phone and see a 3D model of a T-Rex playing a saxophone right in your living room? Yeet, indeed!

Take, for instance, the glorious insanity of AR installations. Picture this: you're waltzing through a park, minding your own business, when BAM! – you hold up your phone and suddenly you're surrounded by Van Gogh's Starry Night swirling around you. But wait, there's more! Tap your screen and now it's a mash-up with Kanye West’s face superimposed on the stars, each twinkling to the beat of "Gold Digger." AR takes traditional art, dunks it in a vat of pop culture references, and serves it up with a side of “OMG, what even is reality anymore?”

Now, let’s slide into the realm of VR. Oh boy, VR! The lovechild of The Matrix and every sci-fi movie ever, where you strap on those oversized goggles and suddenly you’re not just viewing art, you’re inside it. Yes, my friends, VR is the ultimate “choose your own adventure” book but with fewer words and more chances to walk into walls because you forgot you were in your mom’s basement.

Imagine stepping into a virtual gallery. You're no longer just a casual observer; you're Tony Stark flying through a museum of mind-bending creations. Here, a giant, pulsating jellyfish sculpture floats by. There, an interactive 3D model of a black hole swirls ominously, narrated by none other than Morgan Freeman because, obviously, his voice makes everything 1000% more epic. KA-POW!

Speaking of interactive, let's not forget about those VR art experiences that let you go full-on Bob Ross. Don your VR headset, grab your virtual paintbrush, and get ready to paint some “happy little trees” that you can literally walk around. Or, if you're feeling particularly avant-garde, why not create a VR masterpiece that involves neon cats riding on rainbows while quoting Shakespeare? "To yeet, or not to yeet," that is the question.

But wait, it gets wilder. Remember Pokémon GO? That was just the tip of the AR iceberg. Now, artists are creating mixed reality installations that blur the lines between the digital and the physical. Like, picture an art exhibit where you don AR glasses and suddenly the sculptures around you start talking. Not in a creepy, haunted-house way, but more like, “Hey, you look smashing today! Care to know my history?” It’s like Dora the Explorer meets Night at the Museum, but with a dash of Salvador Dalí.

And because we’re living in the age of TikTok and meme culture, these AR and VR art pieces are designed to be as shareable as possible. Snap a selfie with a digital Mona Lisa that dabs when you say “cheese,” or record a video of yourself dancing through a VR Salvador Dalí landscape, because if it didn’t go viral, did it even happen?

Now, here's the kicker: AR and VR art isn't just about creating mind-blowing visuals. It’s about making science meets art a reality. Literally. Imagine virtual galleries where you can explore interactive 3D models of scientific phenomena. Like, ever wanted to take a stroll through a human cell? Pop on your VR headset and shrink down to microscopic size, Ant-Man style, to wander through a nucleus and high-five some ribosomes. Or how about AR experiences where you can see the constellations mapped out in the night sky above you, complete with animated mythological creatures acting out their tales because plain old stargazing is so last century.

These techy art forms are also breaking down barriers, making art more accessible. You don’t need to travel to a far-off museum or shell out big bucks for an art show. Nope, just plop down on your couch, put on your VR headset, and voila! You’re at an exclusive art exhibit in Paris, sipping virtual champagne and nodding knowingly at pieces you pretend to understand. Très chic!

So, what does this all mean for the future? Will we all become digital art connoisseurs, navigating through a sea of virtual Picassos and AR Pollocks? Probably not. But we will have a heck of a lot of fun pretending. The fusion of AR and VR with art is like throwing a rave in the Louvre – it’s chaotic, exhilarating, and a little bit bonkers.

As we hurtle towards this techy art future, remember to keep your sense of humor intact. Whether you’re exploring a VR art space where kittens in space suits perform Hamlet or you're using AR to turn your living room into a disco with Andy Warhol lookalikes, the key is to embrace the absurdity. After all, if we can’t laugh at the idea of a digital Van Gogh quoting Snoop Dogg while floating above our heads, what’s the point?

So, dear students, go forth and dive into the fantastical world of AR and VR art. Strap on those headsets, fire up those apps, and prepare to be amazed, bemused, and probably a little bit confused. Just remember, when someone asks you what you did today, you can proudly say, “I explored the intersection of science and art in a mixed reality installation where Banksy’s graffiti danced to TikTok tunes.” And if they look at you like you're crazy, just smile knowingly and say, “It was lit.”

[kammartinez]

By Elizabeth Kolbert

David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”

Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.

While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.

“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.

In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.

The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.

One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.

“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”

Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford.

“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”

Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.

“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?”

Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.

CETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.

In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm-whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.

The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. CETI 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.

About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.

The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm-whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.

Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”

A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.

As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.

We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we travelled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave.

“I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.

Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, CETI 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.

The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole-handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on CETI 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.

On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat—a forty-foot catamaran called CETI 1—was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw.

Because sperm whales are always on the move, there’s no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a V.R. headset, which was linked to the drone’s video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone’s perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale’s back.

The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. “The nerves get to you,” he said.

“No pressure,” Gruber joked. “It’s not like there’s a New Yorker reporter watching or anything.” Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.

Sperm whales are among the world’s deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale’s route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that—assuming all went according to plan—the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.

I said it was too bad we couldn’t yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.

“Come back in two years,” Gruber said.

Every sperm whale’s tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To I.D. a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is CETI’s lead field biologist, Shane Gero.

Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his “human family” and his “whale family.” (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described Gero as sounding “like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy.”

When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project CETI, he was, initially, suspicious. “I get a lot of e-mails like ‘Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads,’ and ‘Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,’ ” Gero told me. “The first e-mail David sent me was, like, ‘Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”

A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. CETI received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)

The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita’s daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as “tightly and actively social.” Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members—Sally and TBB—the Rs adopted them.

Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they’re around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are “socially ostracized.” Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females—presumably not their immediate relatives—only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.

Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there’s a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.

“It’s like my kids and their cousins,” Gero said.

The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn’t been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island’s treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children’s book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.

“For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns,” he said. “And, you know, sure, they won’t have a word for ‘tree.’ And there’s some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”

After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn’t hear anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.

The first scientific, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale,” it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.

At the time, sperm-whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale’s day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species’ embarrassing name.)

Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. “It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout,” he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle—“a most timid and inoffensive animal.” Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing “Moby-Dick.” (His personal copy of “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” is now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a “pyramidical silence.”

“The whale has no voice,” Melville wrote. “But then again,” he went on, “what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”

The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they’d encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of “sharp clicks,” and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm-whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed “codas.” Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.

Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the “universal truths” about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume.

Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they “babble.”

The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twenty-five codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it’s about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it’s twice that long. In four decreasing, or 4D, there’s a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then, there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.

If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twenty-five represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, CETI team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.

When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm-whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. “They’re talking on top of each other all the time,” Gero told me.

A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)

Roger: 1+1+3 Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3 Roger: 9I Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 10I Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3 Roger: 11I Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 10I, 11I, 1+1+3 Rita: 1+1+3

The “conversation” continues along much these same lines, until Rita finally changes her tune:

Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 12R, 10I, 10I, 9I, 9I Rita: 9I, 8I

Not long ago, suffering from writer’s block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite “Moby-Dick” from the whale’s perspective. The chatbot began modestly. “As an A.I. language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt,” it told me. Then it launched into what it titled “Moby-Dick—The White Leviathan’s Tale.”

In Moby-Dick’s “Moby-Dick,” the plot turned on an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab’s leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.

“My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents,” ChatGPT wrote:

I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab’s thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean’s might.

In paragraph seven, I was surprised—and excited—to see the whale/bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:

Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain’s quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.

As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of Web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)

In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.

Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the CETI team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.

“One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote.

In addition to bugging individual whales, CETI is planning to tether a series of three “listening stations” to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm-whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.

One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and CETI’s station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy SEAL, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment—essentially, large collections of hydrophones—would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, “You know, we’re going to need more of these.” Aluma nodded glumly.

The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year’s worth of delays for CETI. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of CETI’s Dominica-based staff set out in the middle of the night on CETI 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.

The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. “They deal with infrastructure that’s very solid,” Aluma explained. “But a buoy has its own life. And they didn’t calculate so well the torque or load on different motions—twisting and moving sideways.” The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the CETI team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn’t float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.

A sperm whale’s head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as “big-headed blowhole.”) “From just about any angle,” Hal Whitehead, one of the world’s leading sperm-whale experts (and Gero’s thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear “very strange.” I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end—partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice—I dropped the idea.

Instead, I joined the crew on CETI 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we’d been under way for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat’s starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle’s daughter.

Earlier that day, the crew on CETI 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. “This looks very defensive,” Gero said, referring to the formation.

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.

The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.

To everyone’s relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up—dozens of them.

“I don’t like the way they’re moving,” Gruber said.

“They’re going to attack for sure,” Gero said. The pilot whales’ distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.

What followed was something out of a marine-mammal “Lord of the Rings.” Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser’s dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).

“I have no prior knowledge upon which to predict what happens next,” Gero announced. After several minutes, the pilot whales retreated. The dolphins curled through the waves. The whales remained bunched together. Calm reigned. Then the pilot whales made another run at the sperm whales. The water bubbled and churned.

“The pilot whales are just being pilot whales,” Gero observed. Clearly, though, in the great “struggle for existence,” everyone on board CETI 1 was on the side of the baby.

The skirmishing continued. The pilot whales retreated, then closed in again. The drones began to run out of power. Pagani and Kenny piloted them back to the catamaran to exchange the batteries. These were so hot they had to be put in the boat’s refrigerator. At one point, Gero thought that he spied the new calf, still alive and well. (He would later, from the drone footage, identify the baby’s mother as Rounder.) “So that’s good news,” he called out.

The pilot whales hung around for more than two hours. Then, all at once, they were gone. The dolphins, too, swam off.

“There will never be a day like this again,” Gero said as CETI 1 headed back to shore.

That evening, everyone who’d been on board CETI 1 and CETI 2 gathered at a dockside restaurant for a dinner in honor of the new calf. Gruber made a toast. He thanked the team for all its hard work. “Let’s hope we can learn the language with that baby whale,” he said.

I was sitting with Gruber and Gero at the end of a long table. In between drinks, Gruber suggested that what we had witnessed might not have been an attack. The scene, he proposed, had been more like the last act of “The Lion King,” when the beasts of the jungle gather to welcome the new cub.

“Three different marine mammals came together to celebrate and protect the birth of an animal with a sixteen-month gestation period,” he said. Perhaps, he hypothesized, this was a survival tactic that had evolved to protect mammalian young against sharks, which would have been attracted by so much blood and which, he pointed out, would have been much more numerous before humans began killing them off.

“You mean the baby whale was being protected by the pilot whales from the sharks that aren’t here?” Gero asked. He said he didn’t even know what it would mean to test such a theory. Gruber said they could look at the drone footage and see if the sperm whales had ever let the pilot whales near the newborn and, if so, how the pilot whales had responded. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.

“That’s a nice story,” Mevorach interjected.

“I just like to throw ideas out there,” Gruber said.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), at M.I.T., occupies a Frank Gehry-designed building that appears perpetually on the verge of collapse. Some wings tilt at odd angles; others seem about to split in two. In the lobby of the building, there’s a vending machine that sells electrical cords and another that dispenses caffeinated beverages from around the world. There’s also a yellow sign of the sort you might see in front of an elementary school. It shows a figure wearing a backpack and carrying a briefcase and says “NERD XING.”

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL (pronounced “see-sale”), is a roboticist. “There’s such a crazy conversation these days about machines,” she told me. We were sitting in her office, which is dominated by a robot, named Domo, who sits in a glass case. Domo has a metal torso and oversized, goggly eyes. “It’s either machines are going to take us down or machines are going to solve all of our problems. And neither is correct.”

Along with several other researchers at CSAIL, Rus has been thinking about how CETI might eventually push beyond coda prediction to something approaching coda comprehension. This is a formidable challenge. Whales in a unit often chatter before they dive. But what are they chattering about? How deep to go, or who should mind the calves, or something that has no analogue in human experience?

“We are trying to correlate behavior with vocalization,” Rus told me. “Then we can begin to get evidence for the meaning of some of the vocalizations they make.”

She took me down to her lab, where several graduate students were tinkering in a thicket of electronic equipment. In one corner was a transparent plastic tube loaded with circuitry, attached to two white plastic flippers. The setup, Rus explained, was the skeleton of a robotic turtle. Lying on the ground was the turtle’s plastic shell. One of the students hit a switch and the flippers made a paddling motion. Another student brought out a two-foot-long robotic fish. Both the fish and the turtle could be configured to carry all sorts of sensors, including underwater cameras.

“We need new methods for collecting data,” Rus said. “We need ways to get close to the whales, and so we’ve been talking a lot about putting the sea turtle or the fish in water next to the whales, so that we can image what we cannot see.”

CSAIL is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students. “People here are kind of audacious,” Rus said. “They really love the wild and crazy ideas that make a difference.” She told me about a diver she had met who had swum with the sperm whales off Dominica and, by his account at least, had befriended one. The whale seemed to like to imitate the diver; for example, when he hung in the water vertically, it did, too.

“The question I’ve been asking myself is: Suppose that we set up experiments where we engage the whales in physical mimicry,” Rus said. “Can we then get them to vocalize while doing a motion? So, can we get them to say, ‘I’m going up’? Or can we get them to say, ‘I’m hovering’? I think that, if we were to find a few snippets of vocalizations that we could associate with some meaning, that would help us get deeper into their conversational structure.”

While we were talking, another CSAIL professor and CETI collaborator, Jacob Andreas, showed up. Andreas, a computer scientist who works on language processing, said that he had been introduced to the whale project at a faculty retreat. “I gave a talk about understanding neural networks as a weird translation problem,” he recalled. “And Daniela came up to me afterwards and she said, ‘Oh, you like weird translation problems? Here’s a weird translation problem.’ ”

Andreas told me that CETI had already made significant strides, just by reanalyzing Gero’s archive. Not only had the team uncovered the new kind of signal but also it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. “The amount of information that this system can carry is much bigger,” he said.

“The holy grail here—the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems—is what’s called ‘duality of patterning,’ ” Andreas went on. “Duality of patterning” refers to the way that meaningless units—in English, sounds like “sp” or “ot”—can be combined to form meaningful units, like “spot.” If, as is suspected, clicks are empty of significance but codas refer to something, then sperm whales, too, would have arrived at duality of patterning. “Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I’m optimistic—though still not sure—that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales,” Andreas said.

The question of whether any species possesses a “communication system” comparable to that of humans is an open and much debated one. In the nineteen-fifties, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that children learn language through positive reinforcement; therefore, other animals should be able to do the same. The linguist Noam Chomsky had a different view. He dismissed the notion that kids acquire language via conditioning, and also the possibility that language was available to other species.

In the early nineteen-seventies, a student of Skinner’s, Herbert Terrace, set out to confirm his mentor’s theory. Terrace, at that point a professor of psychology at Columbia, adopted a chimpanzee, whom he named, tauntingly, Nim Chimpsky. From the age of two weeks, Nim was raised by people and taught American Sign Language. Nim’s interactions with his caregivers were videotaped, so that Terrace would have an objective record of the chimp’s progress. By the time Nim was three years old, he had a repertoire of eighty signs and, significantly, often produced them in sequences, such as “banana me eat banana” or “tickle me Nim play.” Terrace set out to write a book about how Nim had crossed the language barrier and, in so doing, made a monkey of his namesake. But then Terrace double-checked some details of his account against the tapes. When he looked carefully at the videos, he was appalled. Nim hadn’t really learned A.S.L.; he had just learned to imitate the last signs his teachers had made to him.

“The very tapes I planned to use to document Nim’s ability to sign provided decisive evidence that I had vastly overestimated his linguistic competence,” Terrace wrote.

Since Nim, many further efforts have been made to prove that different species—orangutans, bonobos, parrots, dolphins—have a capacity for language. Several of the animals who were the focus of these efforts—Koko the gorilla, Alex the gray parrot—became international celebrities. But most linguists still believe that the only species that possesses language is our own.

Language is “a uniquely human faculty” that is “part of the biological nature of our species,” Stephen R. Anderson, a professor emeritus at Yale and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes in his book “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion.”

Whether sperm-whale codas could challenge this belief is an issue that just about everyone I talked to on the CETI team said they’d rather not talk about.

“Linguists like Chomsky are very opinionated,” Michael Bronstein, the Oxford professor, told me. “For a computer scientist, usually a language is some formal system, and often we talk about artificial languages.” Sperm-whale codas “might not be as expressive as human language,” he continued. “But I think whether to call it ‘language’ or not is more of a formal question.”

“Ironically, it’s a semantic debate about the meaning of language,” Gero observed.

Of course, the advent of ChatGPT further complicates the debate. Once a set of algorithms can rewrite a novel, what counts as “linguistic competence”? And who—or what—gets to decide?

“When we say that we’re going to succeed in translating whale communication, what do we mean?” Shafi Goldwasser, the Radcliffe Institute fellow who first proposed the idea that led to CETI, asked.

“Everybody’s talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT,” Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. “What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that’s a goal for CETI—that you don’t necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don’t understand it. So that’s kind of a weird success.”

Prediction, Goldwasser said, would mean “we’ve realized what the pattern of their speech is. It’s not satisfactory, but it’s something.

“What about the goal of understanding?” she added. “Even on that, I am not a pessimist.”

There are now an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand sperm whales diving the world’s oceans. This is down from an estimated two million in the days before the species was commercially hunted. It’s often suggested that the darkest period for P. macrocephalus was the middle of the nineteenth century, when Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet. In fact, the bulk of the slaughter took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when sperm whales were pursued by diesel-powered ships the size of factories. In the eighteen-forties, at the height of open-boat whaling, some five thousand sperm whales were killed each year; in the nineteen-sixties, the number was six times as high. Sperm whales were boiled down to make margarine, cattle feed, and glue. As recently as the nineteen-seventies, General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid.

Near the peak of industrial whaling, a biologist named Roger Payne heard a radio report that changed his life and, with it, the lives of the world’s remaining cetaceans. The report noted that a whale had washed up on a beach not far from where Payne was working, at Tufts University. Payne, who’d been researching moths, drove out to see it. He was so moved by the dead animal that he switched the focus of his research. His investigations led him to a naval engineer who, while listening for Soviet submarines, had recorded eerie underwater sounds that he attributed to humpback whales. Payne spent years studying the recordings; the sounds, he decided, were so beautiful and so intricately constructed that they deserved to be called “songs.” In 1970, he arranged to have “Songs of the Humpback Whale” released as an LP.

“I just thought: the world has to hear this,” he would later recall. The album sold briskly, was sampled by popular musicians like Judy Collins, and helped launch the “Save the Whales” movement. In 1979, National Geographic issued a “flexi disc” version of the songs, which it distributed as an insert in more than ten million copies of the magazine. Three years later, the International Whaling Commission declared a “moratorium” on commercial hunts which remains in effect today. The move is credited with having rescued several species, including humpbacks and fin whales, from extinction.

Payne, who died in June at the age of eighty-eight, was an early and ardent member of the CETI team. (This was the case, Gruber told me, even though he was disappointed that the project was focussing on sperm whales, rather than on humpbacks, which, he maintained, were more intelligent.) Just a few days before his death, Payne published an op-ed piece explaining why he thought CETI was so important.

Whales, along with just about every other creature on Earth, are now facing grave new threats, he observed, among them climate change. How to motivate “ourselves and our fellow humans” to combat these threats?

“Inspiration is the key,” Payne wrote. “If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers—no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be—the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life.”

Several other CETI team members made a similar point. “One important thing that I hope will be an outcome of this project has to do with how we see life on land and in the oceans,” Bronstein said. “If we understand—or we have evidence, and very clear evidence in the form of language-like communication—that intelligent creatures are living there and that we are destroying them, that could change the way that we approach our Earth.”

“I always look to Roger’s work as a guiding star,” Gruber told me. “The way that he promoted the songs and did the science led to an environmental movement that saved whale species from extinction. And he thought that CETI could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they’re saying, instead of ‘save the whales’ it will be ‘saved by the whales.’

“This project is kind of an offering,” he went on. “Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we’ve invented for positive purposes?”

ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of “Moby-Dick” written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality:

I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace. 

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Elizabeth Kolbert

David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”

Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.

While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.

“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.

In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.

The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.

One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.

“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”

Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford.

“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”

Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.

“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?”

Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.

CETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.

In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm-whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.

The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. CETI 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.

About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.

The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm-whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.

Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”

A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.

As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.

We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we travelled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave.

“I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.

Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, CETI 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.

The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole-handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on CETI 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.

On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat—a forty-foot catamaran called CETI 1—was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw.

Because sperm whales are always on the move, there’s no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a V.R. headset, which was linked to the drone’s video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone’s perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale’s back.

The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. “The nerves get to you,” he said.

“No pressure,” Gruber joked. “It’s not like there’s a New Yorker reporter watching or anything.” Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.

Sperm whales are among the world’s deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale’s route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that—assuming all went according to plan—the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.

I said it was too bad we couldn’t yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.

“Come back in two years,” Gruber said.

Every sperm whale’s tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To I.D. a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is CETI’s lead field biologist, Shane Gero.

Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his “human family” and his “whale family.” (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described Gero as sounding “like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy.”

When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project CETI, he was, initially, suspicious. “I get a lot of e-mails like ‘Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads,’ and ‘Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,’ ” Gero told me. “The first e-mail David sent me was, like, ‘Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”

A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. CETI received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)

The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita’s daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as “tightly and actively social.” Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members—Sally and TBB—the Rs adopted them.

Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they’re around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are “socially ostracized.” Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females—presumably not their immediate relatives—only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.

Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there’s a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.

“It’s like my kids and their cousins,” Gero said.

The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn’t been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island’s treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children’s book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.

“For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns,” he said. “And, you know, sure, they won’t have a word for ‘tree.’ And there’s some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”

After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn’t hear anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.

The first scientific, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale,” it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.

At the time, sperm-whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale’s day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species’ embarrassing name.)

Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. “It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout,” he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle—“a most timid and inoffensive animal.” Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing “Moby-Dick.” (His personal copy of “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” is now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a “pyramidical silence.”

“The whale has no voice,” Melville wrote. “But then again,” he went on, “what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”

The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they’d encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of “sharp clicks,” and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm-whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed “codas.” Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.

Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the “universal truths” about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume.

Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they “babble.”

The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twenty-five codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it’s about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it’s twice that long. In four decreasing, or 4D, there’s a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then, there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.

If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twenty-five represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, CETI team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.

When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm-whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. “They’re talking on top of each other all the time,” Gero told me.

A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)

Roger: 1+1+3 Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3 Roger: 9I Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 10I Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3 Roger: 11I Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 10I, 11I, 1+1+3 Rita: 1+1+3

The “conversation” continues along much these same lines, until Rita finally changes her tune:

Rita: 1+1+3 Roger: 12R, 10I, 10I, 9I, 9I Rita: 9I, 8I

Not long ago, suffering from writer’s block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite “Moby-Dick” from the whale’s perspective. The chatbot began modestly. “As an A.I. language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt,” it told me. Then it launched into what it titled “Moby-Dick—The White Leviathan’s Tale.”

In Moby-Dick’s “Moby-Dick,” the plot turned on an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab’s leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.

“My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents,” ChatGPT wrote:

I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab’s thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean’s might.

In paragraph seven, I was surprised—and excited—to see the whale/bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:

Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain’s quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.

As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of Web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)

In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.

Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the CETI team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.

“One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote.

In addition to bugging individual whales, CETI is planning to tether a series of three “listening stations” to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm-whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.

One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and CETI’s station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy SEAL, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment—essentially, large collections of hydrophones—would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, “You know, we’re going to need more of these.” Aluma nodded glumly.

The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year’s worth of delays for CETI. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of CETI’s Dominica-based staff set out in the middle of the night on CETI 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.

The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. “They deal with infrastructure that’s very solid,” Aluma explained. “But a buoy has its own life. And they didn’t calculate so well the torque or load on different motions—twisting and moving sideways.” The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the CETI team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn’t float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.

A sperm whale’s head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as “big-headed blowhole.”) “From just about any angle,” Hal Whitehead, one of the world’s leading sperm-whale experts (and Gero’s thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear “very strange.” I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end—partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice—I dropped the idea.

Instead, I joined the crew on CETI 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we’d been under way for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat’s starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle’s daughter.

Earlier that day, the crew on CETI 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. “This looks very defensive,” Gero said, referring to the formation.

Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.

“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.

As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.

The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.

To everyone’s relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up—dozens of them.

“I don’t like the way they’re moving,” Gruber said.

“They’re going to attack for sure,” Gero said. The pilot whales’ distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.

What followed was something out of a marine-mammal “Lord of the Rings.” Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser’s dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).

“I have no prior knowledge upon which to predict what happens next,” Gero announced. After several minutes, the pilot whales retreated. The dolphins curled through the waves. The whales remained bunched together. Calm reigned. Then the pilot whales made another run at the sperm whales. The water bubbled and churned.

“The pilot whales are just being pilot whales,” Gero observed. Clearly, though, in the great “struggle for existence,” everyone on board CETI 1 was on the side of the baby.

The skirmishing continued. The pilot whales retreated, then closed in again. The drones began to run out of power. Pagani and Kenny piloted them back to the catamaran to exchange the batteries. These were so hot they had to be put in the boat’s refrigerator. At one point, Gero thought that he spied the new calf, still alive and well. (He would later, from the drone footage, identify the baby’s mother as Rounder.) “So that’s good news,” he called out.

The pilot whales hung around for more than two hours. Then, all at once, they were gone. The dolphins, too, swam off.

“There will never be a day like this again,” Gero said as CETI 1 headed back to shore.

That evening, everyone who’d been on board CETI 1 and CETI 2 gathered at a dockside restaurant for a dinner in honor of the new calf. Gruber made a toast. He thanked the team for all its hard work. “Let’s hope we can learn the language with that baby whale,” he said.

I was sitting with Gruber and Gero at the end of a long table. In between drinks, Gruber suggested that what we had witnessed might not have been an attack. The scene, he proposed, had been more like the last act of “The Lion King,” when the beasts of the jungle gather to welcome the new cub.

“Three different marine mammals came together to celebrate and protect the birth of an animal with a sixteen-month gestation period,” he said. Perhaps, he hypothesized, this was a survival tactic that had evolved to protect mammalian young against sharks, which would have been attracted by so much blood and which, he pointed out, would have been much more numerous before humans began killing them off.

“You mean the baby whale was being protected by the pilot whales from the sharks that aren’t here?” Gero asked. He said he didn’t even know what it would mean to test such a theory. Gruber said they could look at the drone footage and see if the sperm whales had ever let the pilot whales near the newborn and, if so, how the pilot whales had responded. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.

“That’s a nice story,” Mevorach interjected.

“I just like to throw ideas out there,” Gruber said.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), at M.I.T., occupies a Frank Gehry-designed building that appears perpetually on the verge of collapse. Some wings tilt at odd angles; others seem about to split in two. In the lobby of the building, there’s a vending machine that sells electrical cords and another that dispenses caffeinated beverages from around the world. There’s also a yellow sign of the sort you might see in front of an elementary school. It shows a figure wearing a backpack and carrying a briefcase and says “NERD XING.”

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL (pronounced “see-sale”), is a roboticist. “There’s such a crazy conversation these days about machines,” she told me. We were sitting in her office, which is dominated by a robot, named Domo, who sits in a glass case. Domo has a metal torso and oversized, goggly eyes. “It’s either machines are going to take us down or machines are going to solve all of our problems. And neither is correct.”

Along with several other researchers at CSAIL, Rus has been thinking about how CETI might eventually push beyond coda prediction to something approaching coda comprehension. This is a formidable challenge. Whales in a unit often chatter before they dive. But what are they chattering about? How deep to go, or who should mind the calves, or something that has no analogue in human experience?

“We are trying to correlate behavior with vocalization,” Rus told me. “Then we can begin to get evidence for the meaning of some of the vocalizations they make.”

She took me down to her lab, where several graduate students were tinkering in a thicket of electronic equipment. In one corner was a transparent plastic tube loaded with circuitry, attached to two white plastic flippers. The setup, Rus explained, was the skeleton of a robotic turtle. Lying on the ground was the turtle’s plastic shell. One of the students hit a switch and the flippers made a paddling motion. Another student brought out a two-foot-long robotic fish. Both the fish and the turtle could be configured to carry all sorts of sensors, including underwater cameras.

“We need new methods for collecting data,” Rus said. “We need ways to get close to the whales, and so we’ve been talking a lot about putting the sea turtle or the fish in water next to the whales, so that we can image what we cannot see.”

CSAIL is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students. “People here are kind of audacious,” Rus said. “They really love the wild and crazy ideas that make a difference.” She told me about a diver she had met who had swum with the sperm whales off Dominica and, by his account at least, had befriended one. The whale seemed to like to imitate the diver; for example, when he hung in the water vertically, it did, too.

“The question I’ve been asking myself is: Suppose that we set up experiments where we engage the whales in physical mimicry,” Rus said. “Can we then get them to vocalize while doing a motion? So, can we get them to say, ‘I’m going up’? Or can we get them to say, ‘I’m hovering’? I think that, if we were to find a few snippets of vocalizations that we could associate with some meaning, that would help us get deeper into their conversational structure.”

While we were talking, another CSAIL professor and CETI collaborator, Jacob Andreas, showed up. Andreas, a computer scientist who works on language processing, said that he had been introduced to the whale project at a faculty retreat. “I gave a talk about understanding neural networks as a weird translation problem,” he recalled. “And Daniela came up to me afterwards and she said, ‘Oh, you like weird translation problems? Here’s a weird translation problem.’ ”

Andreas told me that CETI had already made significant strides, just by reanalyzing Gero’s archive. Not only had the team uncovered the new kind of signal but also it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. “The amount of information that this system can carry is much bigger,” he said.

“The holy grail here—the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems—is what’s called ‘duality of patterning,’ ” Andreas went on. “Duality of patterning” refers to the way that meaningless units—in English, sounds like “sp” or “ot”—can be combined to form meaningful units, like “spot.” If, as is suspected, clicks are empty of significance but codas refer to something, then sperm whales, too, would have arrived at duality of patterning. “Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I’m optimistic—though still not sure—that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales,” Andreas said.

The question of whether any species possesses a “communication system” comparable to that of humans is an open and much debated one. In the nineteen-fifties, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that children learn language through positive reinforcement; therefore, other animals should be able to do the same. The linguist Noam Chomsky had a different view. He dismissed the notion that kids acquire language via conditioning, and also the possibility that language was available to other species.

In the early nineteen-seventies, a student of Skinner’s, Herbert Terrace, set out to confirm his mentor’s theory. Terrace, at that point a professor of psychology at Columbia, adopted a chimpanzee, whom he named, tauntingly, Nim Chimpsky. From the age of two weeks, Nim was raised by people and taught American Sign Language. Nim’s interactions with his caregivers were videotaped, so that Terrace would have an objective record of the chimp’s progress. By the time Nim was three years old, he had a repertoire of eighty signs and, significantly, often produced them in sequences, such as “banana me eat banana” or “tickle me Nim play.” Terrace set out to write a book about how Nim had crossed the language barrier and, in so doing, made a monkey of his namesake. But then Terrace double-checked some details of his account against the tapes. When he looked carefully at the videos, he was appalled. Nim hadn’t really learned A.S.L.; he had just learned to imitate the last signs his teachers had made to him.

“The very tapes I planned to use to document Nim’s ability to sign provided decisive evidence that I had vastly overestimated his linguistic competence,” Terrace wrote.

Since Nim, many further efforts have been made to prove that different species—orangutans, bonobos, parrots, dolphins—have a capacity for language. Several of the animals who were the focus of these efforts—Koko the gorilla, Alex the gray parrot—became international celebrities. But most linguists still believe that the only species that possesses language is our own.

Language is “a uniquely human faculty” that is “part of the biological nature of our species,” Stephen R. Anderson, a professor emeritus at Yale and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes in his book “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion.”

Whether sperm-whale codas could challenge this belief is an issue that just about everyone I talked to on the CETI team said they’d rather not talk about.

“Linguists like Chomsky are very opinionated,” Michael Bronstein, the Oxford professor, told me. “For a computer scientist, usually a language is some formal system, and often we talk about artificial languages.” Sperm-whale codas “might not be as expressive as human language,” he continued. “But I think whether to call it ‘language’ or not is more of a formal question.”

“Ironically, it’s a semantic debate about the meaning of language,” Gero observed.

Of course, the advent of ChatGPT further complicates the debate. Once a set of algorithms can rewrite a novel, what counts as “linguistic competence”? And who—or what—gets to decide?

“When we say that we’re going to succeed in translating whale communication, what do we mean?” Shafi Goldwasser, the Radcliffe Institute fellow who first proposed the idea that led to CETI, asked.

“Everybody’s talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT,” Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. “What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that’s a goal for CETI—that you don’t necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don’t understand it. So that’s kind of a weird success.”

Prediction, Goldwasser said, would mean “we’ve realized what the pattern of their speech is. It’s not satisfactory, but it’s something.

“What about the goal of understanding?” she added. “Even on that, I am not a pessimist.”

There are now an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand sperm whales diving the world’s oceans. This is down from an estimated two million in the days before the species was commercially hunted. It’s often suggested that the darkest period for P. macrocephalus was the middle of the nineteenth century, when Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet. In fact, the bulk of the slaughter took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when sperm whales were pursued by diesel-powered ships the size of factories. In the eighteen-forties, at the height of open-boat whaling, some five thousand sperm whales were killed each year; in the nineteen-sixties, the number was six times as high. Sperm whales were boiled down to make margarine, cattle feed, and glue. As recently as the nineteen-seventies, General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid.

Near the peak of industrial whaling, a biologist named Roger Payne heard a radio report that changed his life and, with it, the lives of the world’s remaining cetaceans. The report noted that a whale had washed up on a beach not far from where Payne was working, at Tufts University. Payne, who’d been researching moths, drove out to see it. He was so moved by the dead animal that he switched the focus of his research. His investigations led him to a naval engineer who, while listening for Soviet submarines, had recorded eerie underwater sounds that he attributed to humpback whales. Payne spent years studying the recordings; the sounds, he decided, were so beautiful and so intricately constructed that they deserved to be called “songs.” In 1970, he arranged to have “Songs of the Humpback Whale” released as an LP.

“I just thought: the world has to hear this,” he would later recall. The album sold briskly, was sampled by popular musicians like Judy Collins, and helped launch the “Save the Whales” movement. In 1979, National Geographic issued a “flexi disc” version of the songs, which it distributed as an insert in more than ten million copies of the magazine. Three years later, the International Whaling Commission declared a “moratorium” on commercial hunts which remains in effect today. The move is credited with having rescued several species, including humpbacks and fin whales, from extinction.

Payne, who died in June at the age of eighty-eight, was an early and ardent member of the CETI team. (This was the case, Gruber told me, even though he was disappointed that the project was focussing on sperm whales, rather than on humpbacks, which, he maintained, were more intelligent.) Just a few days before his death, Payne published an op-ed piece explaining why he thought CETI was so important.

Whales, along with just about every other creature on Earth, are now facing grave new threats, he observed, among them climate change. How to motivate “ourselves and our fellow humans” to combat these threats?

“Inspiration is the key,” Payne wrote. “If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers—no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be—the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life.”

Several other CETI team members made a similar point. “One important thing that I hope will be an outcome of this project has to do with how we see life on land and in the oceans,” Bronstein said. “If we understand—or we have evidence, and very clear evidence in the form of language-like communication—that intelligent creatures are living there and that we are destroying them, that could change the way that we approach our Earth.”

“I always look to Roger’s work as a guiding star,” Gruber told me. “The way that he promoted the songs and did the science led to an environmental movement that saved whale species from extinction. And he thought that CETI could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they’re saying, instead of ‘save the whales’ it will be ‘saved by the whales.’

“This project is kind of an offering,” he went on. “Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we’ve invented for positive purposes?”

ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of “Moby-Dick” written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality:

I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace. 

[the-jellydex]

Box Jellyfish Chirp!

I always make sure to mention this at every chance I get, but a box jellyfish put into an ideal position (so this one, basically- it's the only one I've seen actually make this noise) will chirp

// ok, "whistle" is probably the most correct term in this situation since I believe the sound is just air coming out of the jelly's velarium (what water typically passes through when the jelly swims underwater)

but the sound is close enough to a chirp that I just call it that. It's cuter that way, imo

[swldx]

RNZ Pacific 1309 10 Nov 2022

7390Khz 1258 10 NOV 2022 - RNZ PACIFIC (NEW ZEALAND) in ENGLISH from RANGITAIKI. SINPO = 55344. English, @1258z s/on w/bellbird int. until pips and news @1300z anchored by Lydia Lewis. Fiji's Director of Public Prosecutions, Christopher Pryde, has instructed the Police not to lay any charges against National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad. Prasad had been interviewed by police but released on bail to appear in court on November 15 pending the filing of charges, which were not laid. Police were acting on a complaint from a woman who alleged Prasad had indecently annoyed her on two separate occasions earlier this year. Speaking at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, Tuvalu's Prime Minister Kausea Natano said, "the warming seas are starting to swallow our lands, inch by inch. But the world's addiction to oil, gas, and coal can't sink our dreams under the waves. We, therefore, unite with a hundred Nobel Peace Prize laureates and thousands of scientists worldwide and urge leaders to join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to manage a just transition away from fossil fuels." A leading expert on climate refugees says the world needs to come to grips with the issue to avoid chaos at countries' borders. Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis told the COP27 UN climate conference in Egypt overnight that rich countries must slash climate emissions or eventually face dealing with potentially tens of millions of climate refugees. Palau has raised the issue of its prized jellyfish and the economic impact of losing millions of them, during talks at Cop27 in Egypt. The country's president, Surangel Whipps Jr, said extreme heat has killed more than 30 million of the animals in Jellyfish Lake. Whipps said this was the third known event after it also happened in 1997 and 2017, and each time the jellyfish disappeared for two years. He said Palau was at risk of losing a critical component of its tourism industry, further decimating its economy. Snorkeling in Jellyfish Lake is a popular activity for tourists to Palau. Greenpeace New Zealand is asking people of the Pacific to share their views on deep-sea mining in a new online survey translated into nine Pacific languages. Greenpeace Aotearoa seabed mining campaigner James Hita said the movement to halt deep sea mining is strong and growing. Concerns were raised over the dumping of tailings waste from the Wafi Golpu mine in Papua New Guinea. US/Japan war games in the east china sea as an answer to Chinese aggression. Sports. @1309z "Pacific Waves" anchored by Koroi Hawkins. Backyard fence antenna, Etón e1XM. 100kW, beamAz 35°, bearing 240°. Received at Plymouth, United States, 12912KM from transmitter at Rangitaiki. Local time: 0658.

[winsmoke]

𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡

Renjun quickly grows better at speaking in English to talk dirty to you in class.

⊹ 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 1.2k ⊹ 𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 bored female student y/n x Renjun ⊹ 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞 college au (online), fluff, strangers to lovers au ⊹ 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 swearing, suggestive  ⊹ 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫’𝐬 🦷 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞 This was my first NCT fanfiction. I just reread this and holy shit it’s horrible. I’m so embarrassed. ⊹ 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬 disclaimer | masterlist

   The online english summer course was quite possibly one of Renjun’s worst ideas. This is the conclusion Renjun came to after the first 15 minutes of class. He was good at understanding English but when it came to speaking it? As if. And obviously, the course just happened to stress verbal communication more than grammar and spelling. 

   Presentations, skits, singing, and essentially everything orally possible. Plus homework after a two hour class…there was no way.

   “I’m going to put everyone into breakout rooms,” Professor Johnson announced. “First introduce yourselves, in english, and then practice reading out loud the vocab list I sent you. And with your partner, prepare a sentence using the new vocabulary. You will need to learn these words by tomorrow so don’t slack off.”

　Although everyone’s video picture was small, it was clear the whole class had become nauseated by Professor Johnson’s words. 

   When the breakout room appeared on his computer screen, there was no one there. Must be an odd number of students in the class, Renjun realized. Frustrated, he opened his emails and clicked on the quizlet link the professor sent to the class.

   “Fuck, might as well get some of this shit started,” Renjun muttered, selecting the ‘flashcards’ button, not realizing that you had finally entered the breakout room. 

   “Learn 30 vocab words by tomorrow? This man trippin’… okay I know ocean… sea? Yeah… river, I’ve heard that before… lake… gu-gulf?... bay… wait isn’t that like or girlfriend?... octopus… when the hell is this gonna be relevant in my life??” Renjun slammed the mouse down on his desk in annoyance. 

   You couldn’t control the laugh that spilled from your lips.

   “Oh shit!” Renjun glanced frantically around his room, expectedly waiting for an alien or a ghost to pop his ass. 

   “Bro chill, I’m in the breakout room,” you said cooly with a raised eyebrow. Damn this boy must be innocent as fuck. 

   Realizing his mistake, Renjun blushed darkly and minimized Chrome to look at you. 

   “Uh sorry...” he mumbled, licking his lips nervously. 

   “You’re good.”

　You slowly analyze his face while he scrutinized yours. Both of you had achingly cute faces, contrasting your more depraved thoughts and attributes. While Renjun’s eyes fell on your plump lips, your eyes landed on Renjun’s dyed hair.

   “Interesting hair,” you commented after making your final judgement of Renjun’s inferiority. 

   “What’s wrong with being a blonde?” Renjun asked, feeling offended.

   “Nothing,” you shrugged. You didn’t like talking much, explanations were too tiring. 

   “Well, I like your hair,” Renjun offered hopefully, fishing for a compliment in return.

　You cracked your wrists in irritation. So desperate, you thought.

   “Should we go over the flash cards? I’m y/n, what’s your name.” You wanted to make this process as painless as possible. 

   “Huang Renjun. It’s nice to meet you,” he said and shyly smiled.

　You bit your lip to contain your own. You had to admit that he was kind of adorable. Pushing the urge to smile back aside, you quickly opened the quizlet and scanned through.

   “This is so easy: ocean, sea, river, lake gulf, bay, creek, octopus, whale, jellyfish, swimming suit, to swim, to be wet–” you read off rapidly.

   “How are you so good?” Renjun interrupted, amazed and slightly insecure. He brought his face close to his laptop’s camera making you a little uneasy. You shrugged again.

   “Does it matter?” your tone marginally betraying you.

   “I guess not… ” Renjun sighed, he wasn’t getting anywhere with you. “Um, should we make a sentence?” 

   You gave a singular nod.

   “How about I swim in the ocean?” Renjun suggested.

   “That’s boring,” you whined, “Ugh, this summer is going to bore me into my grave.”

   “Well since your so smart why don’t you think of an riviting sentence?” Renjun huffed, getting fed up with you. You glowered at him.

   He wants a riveting sentence? Fuck it.

   “How about you drowned in the ocean?” you offer sharply. “Or how about, the octopus made the girl wet? Is that entertaining enough for you?”

   Suddenly the breakout room switched back to the main session.

   “Alright everyone share your sentences with the class!” Professor Johnson instructed happily. 

   “I’ll start,” Renjun sneers. You were ready to reach into your laptop and slap this boy. 

   “In the ocean, the girl drowned because the octopus put one of the tentacles in her mouth,” he said with a deadpan expression.

　You almost screamed. The balls this guy has.

   “Wow! What a long sentence! And you used a lot of vocabulary we haven’t covered yet!” the teacher praised. Renjun smiled widely and when the teacher asked for another volunteer he winked into the camera. 

   By the end of the class, the two had exchanged so many subtle sexual innuendos you both didn’t know if you were horny because of the dirty words or the desire to strangle one another. Either way, you two carried out the rest of their day pissed. Renjun was so hellbent on coming up with more arousing sentences the next class that he studied the vocabulary for the following day. 

   Both of you couldn’t figure out how to get yourselves off when you fell into bed that night.

   The next day, the two of you could not take their eyes off one another but you weren’t partnered together. The next day you weren’t partnered together again. And again. This only encouraged you two to make even dirtier sentences to say once the breakout rooms returned to the main session. Miraculously, no one caught wind of what you were insinuating, not even the professor. 

   By the end of the week, Renjun finally appeared on your breakout room screen. You had been told to come up with a skit to perform on Monday. 

   Strangely the script you came up with was rather civilized. And since you both were determined to out smart one another, you had memorized it by the third run through. But that didn’t matter, you two had to see each other.

   “I think you need more practice,” Renjun advised innocently. You scoffed.

   “Clearly it’s you who needs more time.”

   “Well since we both need to rehearse, how about we meet up?” Renjun proposed.

   “We’re in a whole pandemic right now,” you try to reason.

　Renjun couldn’t help himself but watch your lips. They were too plump.

   “I’m clean if you are,” Renjun said, licking his lips.

   “Where would we even meet?” you asked, racking your brains. You were too far gone now. 

   “I think a car is a big enough space to rehearse,” Renjun said, biting his lip in anticipation.

   “Tomorrow?” you asked, almost moaning.

   “Tonight,” Renjun demanded. “Send me an addy, I’ll be there at 8.”

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Diary of the Writing Raven

Part 3 of the 1000+ follower milestone! A continuation of Raven lore (check out part 1 and part 2 for more context)!

Today, we will peak into the raven’s diary. Shhh, don’t tell anyone. The bulk of the entries are hidden under the cut--because a bird has to keep their secrets under lock and key!

***Warning: Spoilers for the main story campaign, particularly chapter 3 and chapter 4!***

Day 1

I am here. At Night Raven College.

There is a strange man. He calls himself my Uncle. He says that he is so very, very kind...and that he will give me a nest, a place to call home.

Uncle has given me this diary with which to record my thoughts. I will put it to good use.

I am thankful.

Day 32:

Uncle says I cannot stay in the attic writing.

He says I cannot stay in my cage forever.

Uncle says I must go out into the world.

He says it often.

I am scared.

Day 45

Uncle has given me robes.

He smeared things on my face.

There will be a ceremony of sorts, and I must attend.

...I am still scared.

Day 46

The ceremony is over.

I got lost on the way to the Mirror Chamber.

A weirdo chased me.

But...a nice person helped. Then he guided me to the ceremony.

He had very pretty eyes.

His name is Mon-sure Schemer? Mister Jade Leech. I hope I can see him again.

Day 49

I am so fortunate! I have stumbled upon Mister Jade again--this time in the hallway.

There was another Mister Jade with him. His name is actually Mister Floyd. They are brothers--twins, in fact! Eel mermen, too.

They look alike, but their personalities are quite different. It is a curious thing.

Mister Floyd is a little scary. He talks funny, and he is moody--but he promises he does not bite. He has taken to calling me “Black Pearly”.

They say they work at this “Mostro Lounge”, and that I should visit.

I am excited!

P.S. Mister Jade says I do not need to call them misters. I will be doing that!

Day 50

The Mostro Lounge is lovely! It has these glowing jellyfish lights, and seashell decorations. There is cool jazz, and a calming underwater ambiance.

Jade seats me and gives me recommendations. I don’t know what a lot of things on the menu are--Uncle has been feeding me mostly grain and small scraps of meat, trying to get me accustomed to human food.

Jade brings me a thing called Flounder’s Blue. He says it will be easier to hold down than solid food.

Flounder’s Blue comes in a short and stout glass. The liquid itself is actually yellow, with streaks of a blue drip swiped on the inside of the glass, and a blue...circle (?) stuck in, protruding out like a fin.

It tastes...sugary. I do not yet have the words in my vocabulary to properly describe it.

Jade tells me the circle is a “wafer”, the blue is a “syrup”, and the liquid is a “pineapple and cherry juice”.

I am learning many new things today.

Jade is so smart!

Day 54

I almost flopped at giving a presentation to Professor Trein’s class.

Floyd says it’s because I talk strangely, that I stutter and pause too much.

“Why can the Black Pearly write so much, but talk so little?” he asks. “You should tell Jade to tutor you, he’s pretty good with words!”

I have to agree with him. Jade taught me many new words in the Mostro Lounge before. I was embarrassed, but I asked him for help.

He was happy to oblige.

We will meet a few times each week to work on my speaking skills.

Day 59

I tripped and fell in P.E.--I am still no good at running.

Jade was sweet and helped patch me up.

I cried a little.

Okay, a lot.

He stayed with me until I stopped.

Day 71

I have gotten into the habit of visiting the Mostro Lounge every weekend.

The owner, Azul, is friends with the twins. He lets me sit at a table in the corner to do my work and practice speaking.

Jade sits with me and exchanges words.

He has me read stories I have penned aloud.

Sometimes he puts a plate of snacks or a drink in front of me and asks me to taste them, then describe the flavor to him. Other times, he points to people or things in the lounge and asks me to give my thoughts.

Once, he pointed at himself. I told him that he was very patient, that he was someone I trusted.

“Fufu. That is good to hear,” he says.

I also told him that his smile was beautiful.

Day 75

Today, I saw Jade’s true form.

We were swimming today in P.E., but I had to sit out. Ravens cannot swim.

Floyd and Jade were eager to get into the water. Their skin turns blue, and they sprout fins and long eel tails.

...I am not entirely certain why they lack clothing though? It must not be customary for merfolk.

They are having fun in the water.

I am glad.

Day 83

An angry Savanaclaw student came to me in the hallway after Alchemy.

He started to say something about the Leeches and deals, but Floyd told him to stop bothering me. In that moment...Floyd looked like a monster, all teeth and sharp edges.

Jade pulled me away and invited me to go hiking with him.

It sounds fun, but I am concerned about the Savanaclaw student.

Jade says to not fret.

So I listen.

Day 84

There is so much to see in the mountains!

Trees! Streams of water! Rocks! Dirt! Animals! Plants! The sky!

I want to experience everything at once. I am so excitable that I trip over my own two feet a few times--but it’s okay. Jade is always there to help me up.

His favorite thing about nature is mushrooms. He tells me all about them, and the places they like to hide.

I like listening to him talk. His voice is so deep and melodious--and his eyes sparkle when he is excited.

It’s very cute.

Day 86

Jade shows me the mushrooms he is cultivating, and his terrariums.

They are fascinating--each mushroom has its own personality, and each terrarium is like a miniature world.

A thought has wormed its way into my head as of late:

I wonder what it would be like to be a part of his world.

Day 90

It rained.

I shared an umbrella with Jade.

It was a little strange to be squished right next to him.

My heart would not stop pounding, and my cheeks were on fire.

Day 112

The days are growing colder, and shorter.

I wish that time did not fly so fast.

I want to spend more of it with Jade.

I need to return the jacket he lent me.

Day 120

Uncle is worried.

He says I spend too much time with “morally dubious” people.

He questions my ability to judge character.

He does not believe me when I tell him that Jade is a good person.

Uncle warns me to be careful.

I am being careful.

Day 132

Winter has set in.

Jade is kind enough to provide blankets and warm beverages for our study sessions.

At this point, I do not have many issues speaking, but...I do not want to stop. I want to learn more and more. I want to learn more about him.

I enjoy being by his side.

I hope he feels the same.

Day 139

We said our good-byes for the holiday break.

Uncle is taking me with him to a tropical island, and Jade is staying in Octavinelle.

I tell him I will miss him, even if it is just for a few weeks. He looks a bit sad, but he sends me off with a head pat and a smile.

Uncle offers to order me a tropical drink as we board the cruise ship. He tells me not to think of Leeches--those vile, blood-suckers, he calls them.

I say no thank you, but I dream of Flounder’s Blue.

Day 153

The new year has come.

It feels nice to be back on campus, to see Jade again.

We exchanged stories.

Not much happened on my end--I mostly sat indoors and wrote what I could to pass the time. Uncle was often up late into the night, partying and sipping on pina coladas.

Jade says that he helped a few friends and stopped a snake from tearing apart Scarabia. He even shows me a video.

How heroic of him!

I know that I can always count on Jade.

Day 166

I went shopping with Jade.

Floyd was in one of his infamous moods, and Azul is busy with school work--and Jade could not possibly restock ingredients for the Mostro Lounge all by himself.

It was quite busy in town--it made me nervous. I’ve never done well in big crowds of strangers.

Jade said I could hold his hand, if that made me feel any better.

It did.

And it reminded me of the day we first met.

Day 170

I’m still thinking about holding his hand.

Whenever I do, my heart quickens and my forehead begins to bead with sweat.

What is wrong with me?

Have I fallen ill?

Day 185

The students speak excitedly about this holiday known as “Valentime’s Day.” It is a time when you give gifts to the people you care for a lot. A common one is a sweet known as chocolate.

Jade laughed when I told him about it. He said it is actually “Valentine’s Day”, not “Valentime’s Day”. Silly me!

I asked him how many valentines he was expecting.

“None. Oh, woe is me. I appear to be rather unpopular among my peers, fufu.”

How could someone as amazing as him not get any valentines? It boggles my mind.

Day 186

I’ve decided.

I will give him a valentine.

Day 193

I’ve stopped writing stories and devoted most of my free time to researching recipes and designing chocolates.

I think he will like little mushroom-shaped ones. I’ll need to test the flavors out to see what works the best.

I hope the chocolates will bring a smile to his face.

I like his smiles.

Day 195

Oh no, diary.

I’ve realized.

I think I like him.

Day 197

The chocolates came out so well!

I’ve wrapped them up in a box and secured it with blue ribbon. There is an old nursery rhyme...

If you love me, love me true,

Send me a ribbon, a ribbon of blue.

Even if I cannot say those accursed three words...I hope that my feelings are able to come across. The curse cannot punish me for that, yes?

Day 198

I was a fool. I have been tricked. I was being used.

I heard them. I heard everything.

In the Mostro Lounge today...the octopus was speaking to them, the twins with the pretty eyes.

“This is not like you. You are working too slow,” the octopus said to the man I considered my friend.

“I apologize. She was...putting up much resistance. It can be rather difficult to form a connection with such a jittery bird.”

“That is your job,” the octopus sighed. “We need the raven on our side when we approach the headmaster about expanding the Mostro Lounge.”

I understand now--I understand it very well.

Those smiles, that kindness--they were smoke and mirrors.

To begin with, I was always destined to be a prop in someone else’s story. A convenience. Something to be used, then discarded once I am no longer useful.

I have overstepped my boundaries as a storyteller. I...should have remained on the sidelines, where I belong.

I...I know what I must do. I will not allow myself to be tricked a third time. Not by that old storyteller, and not by a slimy eel.

I will steel myself. I will build a wall—and none shall scale it. I will lock myself in a tower, or perhaps even a bird cage, and throw away the key.

To the man with the pretty eyes and the charming smile, farewell.

I’m glad that this raven was, at the very least, able to be a useful footnote in the pages of your story.

Day 201

He feeds me pretty lies and sweet nothings, day in and day out.

He tells me everything I want to hear--that it is a misunderstanding, a mistake. That things are different now. That he cares.

Uncle was right. Leeches are vile blood suckers.

Day 210

I reject his advances every chance I get.

I know they are all with ill intent to begin with.

Even so...no matter what I say or do, he always manages to get the upper hand in the conversation, the interaction.

I hate him.

I hate Jade Leech.

I hate how he is able to take my words away and render me speechless. Words are my only strength, my power as a storyteller. Without them, I am vulnerable. 

I don’t want to be the same weak and naive little bird I once was.

Day 213

It is unfair.

Maybe I am too kind, or too weak, or too gullible, but...I want to believe him.

I must put such thoughts behind me and move on.

Day 226

Uncle tells me that someone has sent a letter and a small package.

Into the trash the package goes--right where it belongs.

But the letter--that, I cannot bring myself to throw away.

It bears his handwriting, the very same gentle curves and slopes that taught me new words and phrases many an evening.

It is silly of me to be this sentimental--and over an eel, of all creatures!

So I stow the letter, unopened, in a drawer. It will remain there as a permanent reminder of my follies.

It is better this way.

I cannot be hurt.

I will not be used.

The curse will not kill me.

I can write stories, forever and ever.

This is...for the best. Isn’t it?

[aestheticaxolotl]

Lets Talk About Gunnar Maelstrom

Evil Daddies is where it’s at.

One of the meanings of the word "Maelstrom" is 'A situation of state of confused movement or violent turmoil.

Let me start with Maelstrom, usung the Carmen Sandiego Wiki to break him down as a whole, starting with appearance and personality (Excluding the comments around his action in the show, this will be hard seeing his major inclusion to the story so please bear with me once more as I do this).

Professor Maelstrom is a middle-aged man with pale skin and white hair with a receding hairline. He has broad shoulders and wears a black blazer over a dark gray turtleneck. As stated previously, Maelstrom is seen as being an almost unnaturally pale color, hinting towards possible Albinism.

Now, Middle aged according to the wiki page is between 50 and 60. Seeing the receding hairline and the lines on his face (Also can someone point me to a source about those random chin hairs? Like please I need context). 

He obviously has stress and sleep lines. I imagine these are due to his life choices and idiot operatives. His ethnicity is stated as being Swedish but continues to contradict itself when it later states that Maelstrom is from Scandinavia. I think this is to throw the readers and deep show watchers off and it would work better if both ethnicity and race were left as unknown. 

Now we move on to the easier things, personality, which is LONG. So let me start writing!

Of the five members of V.I.L.E's faculty, Maelstrom seems to command the most authority and serve as the de facto leader of the group, being the first to speak as well as hand out orders. As one may expect, Professor Maelstrom is criminally insane, which is ironic, considering his forte is psychiatry. Professor Maelstrom often likes to tinker with his patients' psyches and enjoys psychologically evaluating students, much like someone finding joy in pulling the wings off a butterfly. He does possess some level of awareness to his own insanity, though he is quick to brush it off as a mere label that other weak-minded people have given him. He also has an apparent fondness for the more psychotic recruits. In keeping with his name, his main desire is to spread chaos and disorder, with any actual gain being a secondary concern at best. Carmen considered him to be creepy, and rightfully so after he and Dr. Bellum collaborated to wipe Crackle's brain. Professor Maelstrom loathes Cookie Booker as he has no tolerance for her stuck up behavior towards him. He seems to have a fondness for marine life, as his office hosts a giant aquarium filled with jellyfish and other specimens. His use of the term "bait" as a pun is in reference to fishing bait, and in the novel adaptation, it is used twice. Further expanding the psychological exam scene from the show, in the novel, he declares that Carmen gave the "wrong" answer to the Rorschach test, stating that the image was a seahorse. The novelization expanded his sense of humor, though it mentions that even that had a dark and unpredictable tinge to it, showing delight in the lengths that his students would go in order to not be called upon in class. The show does have him throw a small quip every once in a while, often tinged with exasperation at his colleagues' antics or ignorance. He also enjoys making Countess Cleo envious of his fashion style, having asked Le Chevre and El Topo in the "The Fishy Doubloon Caper" to acquire an Ecuadorian Eight Escudos doubloon to be melted into solid gold cufflinks.

As done in my previous post, I will be diving deeper into the statement in the bolded font. 

Maelstrom seems to command the most authority and serve as the de facto leader of the group,

I don’t see any major reason for this face besides that there is a level of respect among the Faculty that centers around Maelstrom, seeing as he is one of the psychologically smarter than any of the other members, except Shadowsan but that is a post for another day. He is a very scary character because he is unpredictable, and possibly in the minds of the other, can be blamed for their crimes should they ever had been caught, but this leads me to my second quip with Gunnar Maelstrom.

Professor Maelstrom is criminally insane, which is ironic, considering his forte is psychiatry

When one looks up the term ‘Criminally insane’ we get the following “an accused person that is deemed to be suffering from cognitive illness or fault which frees then of lawful accountability for the unlawful behaviors” from https://psychologydictionary.org/criminally-insane/. 

I cannot at all say that I support this terminology on the stance that Maelstrom is more than aware of his action, to the point where he logically makes the choices to leave his fellow faculty behind at the prospect of capture. One cannot say that a “Criminally insane’ person is able to make these choices so quickly and with such calculation as to pack a go bag and hire an escape driver. But I digress.

He does possess some level of awareness to his own insanity, though he is quick to brush it off as a mere label that other weak-minded people have given him.

I don’t think that Maelstrom can stand to be labeled by other people. The exact use of the phrase “Weak-minded’ points me to believe that Maelstrom sees himself as mentally stronger, powerful, and far beyond that of the average person. This points to his class, and I’ll explain this in the next part, being the most critical and important to V.I.L.E as a whole.

His main desire is to spread chaos and disorder

This is WAY too specific to just be a drop in detail. No character is created be be a chaotic mixture, but they are built to SPREAD chaos, and Maelstrom is the perfect character to do this. His favor to Paperstar is a direct jab at this detail about him, she is an element of chaos that he put into play, the disorder of her is why he places her, while the other faculty hate Paperstar, he finds her the perfect wild card.

Professor Maelstrom loathes Cookie Booker 

I fully think this is, as the wiki and al of my sources say, Cookie Booker represents the original 1998 Carmen Sandeigo. And the loathing between them is a reference to the original game and books.

He seems to have a fondness for marine life, as his office hosts a giant aquarium filled with jellyfish and other specimens.

Not gonna lie, but I love this detail. The details, that caused me to GO BACK and watch the episodes with Maelstrom, was that the man likes fish. This adds onto the effect that he is rather cold and uncaring towards people, seeing them a thing to observe and keep. I also just love the idea of him having a fish tank and spoiling his goldfish that he named Clyde or something equally related to big time crime, like Al Capone or as said before Clyde.

He also enjoys making Countess Cleo envious of his fashion style

I’m sorry but Cleo and Gunnar challenging each other to see who is better in fashion? I’m sorry but they are the fashion police. Also I think this places WHO he is close to in the Faculty. I am very willing to bet that Maelstrom, who left Coach Brunt to drown and die, would NEVER leave Cleo or Bellum (Possibly) to die because they align more with HIS goals.

Brunt is... Dare I say... THE DUMBEST OF THE V.I.L.E FACULTY

WHAT DOES SHE DO?!?!

WHY IS SHE HERE?!

SHE’S STRONG AND THAT’S IT!

I digress (i used that phrase twice now), I just think his goals line up more with Cleo and (Again, possibly) Bellums’.

Now I go onto my favorite part of these paragraphs, the trivia/abilities. I love trivia/abilities, just because everyone sees this word and they are like ‘oh it’s just dumb facts’. BUT NO! It’s DENSTRAMENTAL to the character and links to their personalities.

He is capable of expertly performing a bait and switch. Professor Maelstrom specializes in psychiatry. He has been shown to have a favorite student, similar to the other faculty, in Paper Star; despite her disregard of the protocol in Mumbai. His grudge against Cookie Booker could be a subtle reference to the hostile relationship that his previous incarnation had with Carmen Sandiego in the 90's cartoon. As shown in the season three episode, The Haunted Bayou Caper, he has a fondness for Halloween.

Most od this is already covered, i know, so I won’t go over what I already did. SO let me just say... I know-

He is capable of expertly performing a bait and switch 

I NEED to SEE Maelstrom just- *Pulls and Bait and switch* -STEAL FROM SOMEONE. Like. I could totally believe that Maelstrom is the sleekest, most sneaky, most Swiper is swiping guy in the world. I am okay with letting them tell me this, but NO okay with them not SHOWING ME.

Netflix, I HOPE you see this so you can give me a SHOW on HOW GUNNAR MET MY MOTHER, COUNTESS CLEO.

He has a fondness for Halloween.

Charlie Pants. 

Do I need to say any more?

Okay, big ending time. So Gunnar Maelstrom, a deeply interesting character, mysterious backstory that a person can read into, different fun facts that lead to speculation and interest and amazing stories. I love Gunnar Maelstrom’s character, his personality, and his appearance. His effect? 100. His story? 100. His ability to make me rewatch the series? 100. 

Thanks for reading this. I’ll have another one out soon! Requests are open